Network audio devices provide a convenient way to play digital audio through your home stereo. How do they provide remote access to your music library, given the UI limitations of the first generation of devices? This looks like a job for an information architect.
Interfaces
Perhaps it’s happened to you too. If you’ve clicked on an interesting image or piece of content only to find that you clicked through an online advertisement, you may be missing the lines between content and advertising. Their dichotomy is not new: television networks have been thinking about the distinction for over 60 years. Can their models reveal anything about the future direction of online advertising?
What I Learned From Television
Site advertisements can interfere with content and disrupt layout. Yet they are most often part of website requirements, forcing IAs to come up with strategies for incorportating them. Is there a graceful way to handle ads online?
Ads Are Here To Stay: Planning For Ad Placement
We spend a lot of time talking about the visual identity of a project, but who thinks about its audible identity? Do we need to consider it at all? By learning to consider audio as an important design parameter, we just might learn something…
Why Is That Thing Beeping? A Sound Design Primer
At least several times a year, I try (I really do) to set up folders to sort my email. I am an information architect, after all. Setting up folders is, according to my job description, my area of expertise. Actually, I suck at setting up folders for email.
The Information Architecture of Email
In part one of this article the discussion was one of views, forms, and the manner in which they could be combined into a task structure known as a hub. This installment expands on those themes by exploring two other types of task structures commonly employed in web applications–wizards and guides.
Wizards and Guides
Principles of Task Flow for Web Applications Part 2
Contrary to first impression, an “executive dashboard” is not found in a CIO’s car. Rather, an executive dashboard, also known as a manager dashboard, executive cockpit, or digital cockpit, is a child of what in the 1980s was referred to as the Executive Information System (EIS).
Executive Dashboards
Designing web-based enterprise software involves creating complex artifacts like architecture wireframes, object models, screen flows, and clickable prototypes in order to articulate aspects of the online experience for product stakeholders. But what does “craft” mean for interaction designers?
Learning to Love the Pixel: Exploring the Craft of Icon Design
Just what are the design practices on the web that have the highest frequency? And are there design practices that all (or nearly all) sites employ?
Examining the Role of De Facto Standards on the Web
Sitemaps and site indexes are forms of supplemental navigation. They give users a way to navigate a site without having to use the global navigation. By providing a way to visualize and understand the layout and structure of the site, a sitemap can help a lost or confused user find her way.